With the advancement of information communication technologies, a variety of end-point terminals capable of playing back documents, images and moving pictures (hereinafter, ‘documents, images and moving pictures’ will be simply referred to as ‘contents’ for the convenience of explanation, unless otherwise specified), such as MPeg audio layer-3 (MP3) players, Personal Multimedia Players (PMP) and Ultra Mobile Personal Computers (UMPC), are widely used. A user downloads desired contents from personal computers (PC) and plays back the downloaded contents. However, there is a problem in that the user cannot download desired contents when the user is moving or cannot connect to a PC.
In order to solve the problem, proposed are techniques for adding a communication means connectible to a short-range communication network onto an end-point terminal, such as a Bluetooth or an ultra-wideband (UWB), and connecting the end-point terminal to a mobile communication terminal through the short-range communication network. According to the techniques, a user can be provided with a desired service through an end-point terminal and a mobile communication terminal of the user. That is, the user manipulates the end-point terminal and the mobile communication terminal to communicate with each other in a short-range wireless communication method through the short-range communication network to exchange needed data with each other. The mobile communication terminal is connected to a variety of servers through a mobile communication network (or a wired communication network such as the Internet or the like via the mobile communication network) and relays needed data between the end-point terminal and the servers, and thus the end-point terminal eventually can use a needed data service through the short-range communication network and the mobile communication network owing to the relay of the mobile communication network.
On the other hand, although the end-point terminal used by the user receives contents from a service server via the first mobile communication terminal, a service fee of the end-point terminal needs to be charged on the second mobile communication terminal. For example, if the user is a teenager carrying the first mobile communication terminal and parents of the user have the second mobile communication terminal, the parents may desire a service fee for using contents by the teenage user to be charged on the second mobile communication terminal of the parents, not on the first mobile communication terminal of the child.
Conventionally, techniques for a mobile communication terminal to collect billing information of an end-point terminal for using contents and transmit the billing information to a billing server have been proposed. However, although the conventional techniques are used, the requirements described above cannot be satisfied, and in addition, loads on the mobile communication terminal collecting and transmitting the billing information to the server are intensified furthermore.